And Misery Loves Company
by AFY
Summary: A series of oneshots, vignettes, and drabbles. Fun for the whole family...or maybe not...CHAPTER 4 UPDATE. Alas! My first KARMA!
1. Fairy tale

**Author's note: First, I'd like to thank ThreeOranges for being my beta-reader. Much obliged.**

**Second, it has been awhile since I came here but hey I missed doing this, that, and the genius of Libba Bray drove me to it.**

**I have a (somewhat faint) idea where I'm going with this, don't you worry...**

**I plan to have this in all sorts of point of views, not just by the main quartet themselves but small characters too. I'm open into doing all sorts of parings and when I mean all sorts of pairings, I really do mean all sorts of pairings—in other words, straight and slash pairings. **

**You've been warned...**

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**Disclaimer: I don't own "A great and terrible beauty" trilogy and I shan't ever will but in my fantasies where Johnny Depp is my husband.**

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"Obsessed by a fairy tale, we spend our lives searching for a magic door and a lost kingdom of peace" Eugene O'Neill

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Chapter 1-Fairy tale

"I hate the queen," I confide in Felicity. "In Snow White, I mean..." I add quickly.

It is a Sunday today, a day where everyone has the chance to relax into the lazy afternoon to their hearts' content. Felicity and I are down by the water; we wear over our foreheads little flowers laced into crowns.

"Really?" Felicity replies nonchalantly, "I would've thought you'd hate Snow White instead..." She leans over me then and blows white dandelion all over my face.

"Fee!" I cry, sitting up and swatting the white particles away from my  
face.

Felicity merely smiles without a care, and tosses away the now-bare stalk of green stem. She lies back, supine, across the grass. She yawns, and with her hair left loose and wild - more a warm gold than its usual near-white in the sun - she reminds me of a lioness. Rather fitting really...

"What do you mean, you thought I'd hate Snow White more?" I ask her, rather huffily.

Felicity still has a smile on her face as she closes her eyes, "Well, doesn't Snow White gain her prince rather easily? I mean she just sleeps through the second half of the story, and then he comes along, and 'happily ever after' all around." She snorts. "She doesn't do a thing and yet gets her precious prince!"

"Well, there is that..." I admit, and snatch at a dandelion off the ground. I pluck at its gold petals. "But the queen is who really gets to me! She's such a fool!"

"Oh?" Felicity opens one gray eye at me, raises an eyebrow, and I realize I am plucking at the petals in a rather vicious pace. Heat pools into my cheeks and I stop, embarrassed.

"How is she such a fool, Pip?"

I don't know if she is serious or merely mocking me, but I answer anyway. "Because she wants — wants! - to be the most beautiful," I tell Fee,"She just doesn't get it! She doesn't get that in being the most beautiful, you are the most sad; how it brings in the the terrible -" I make a face,"It only serves her right into dying into what she tries to get. Fool."

I pluck off the last of the petals and angrily cast it away. "I can only wish the heroine herself gets into that same fate." Even I can hear the bitterness coloring my tone, it feels black in my mouth.

Felicity scoffs derisively, "If you can call her a heroine - she and every other girl in every fairy tale you hear."

"And all just so beautiful and too stupid to realize the terrible outcome of that," I am left with but the naked stalk of stem in my hand and I fling it to the lake where it lands and floats on the surface, lightly rippling all around itself. Rippled chaos all around it. "I hate fairy tales."

"And yet you seem to be so enchanted by them," Felicity looks me over, eyes playful, but I see in them the hard challenge as well. She wants me to respond. "If you want"- she reaches for a dark ringlet, twines it around her fingers like you would a leash to a dog- "we can make you a potion to make you the 'Plainest of them all', what do you say?"

"I think not!" I say, nose in the air.

She smirks and releases my hair. She folds her arms behind her head as she gazes up at the sky without another word to me. Typical Fee.

I sat back to watch the sky as well on the support of the heels of my palms.

I hate fairy tales but I need them, the way I need to look at a mirror and look away all at once. If you take away the tales, and the pretty looks, who do you see? Who? Who is Pippa?

Am I really such a weakling to want to avoid that?

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**Author's Note: Pippa comes off as a romantic in the book and I always thought it'd be interesting that of all people, she'd be the most cynical of them. She probably does view them that way just because it comes too close to home and yet...it doesn't, at least not quite. Pippa would definitely have a love-hate vibe toward them. **

**As for Felicity, I smile at the thought of what she probably thinks of fairy tales. They've very anti-Felicity, when you think about it. At least when it comes what she stands for.**

**Read. Review. And above all, critique greatly desired...**


	2. Cat

**Whether it was intentional or not, there was always this lesbian undertone to Felicity and I like to work on that...**

**Well...that's all I have to say on the subject. **

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**Disclaimer: I don't own anything of the story or its characters and thank you for making me die a little inside on just having to say it...**

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_**"Felicity is poised on the crest of the hill, pulling back on her bow...with a sharp snap, she lets it fly...the huntress commends her and the two of them huddle together in conference. I can't help wondering...why Felicity tells me less and less..."--Excerpt from page 292 of "A Great and Terrible Beauty."**_

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**Chapter 2- Cats**

I am a cat-person. Always had been and always will be.

Dogs are loving things, really, that is if you like slobber. Their eyes just beg and beg and beg, "Love me! Love me!"

I had those eyes for Father once. To have him, and mother as well, love me and be with me. _Once upon a time_. Dogs' eyes hit too close to home.

Now cats...

Cats never beg for anything. They demand. "Feed me." "Pet me". "Scratch me behind the ears---yes, like that." Never please or thank you.

Gemma's eyes are like a cat's, they hold you spell-bound and at the same time they cut through you. They're her gems. Heh. Gem...now that is a most suitable nickname.

Through peripheral vision, I see her there, locking her eyes on me. She seemed caught between regal and vulnerable. Eyes intent but with arms hugging tightly around herself.

I feel the huntress' eyes on me too and so I steady my arm. A snap and the arrow pummels hard into the wood, and it cleanly splits into two.

"You've improved so far..." the huntress comments. And I smile happily, though inwardly I scoff at myself. I'm like a daughter looking for her parents' approval. I am not that girl. Not anymore and not anytime soon.

I almost startle when the huntress' fingers lace over my shoulder. Gently, the huntress draws me into her, the both of us huddling. Heat pools in from within me, but who can help it really?

The huntress is beautiful, tanned to the color of burnt butterscotch, her eyes a darker hue. Her hair is wild and thick and it hangs loosely down her back in a chaotic mane but there's a certain grace to it.

And she's naked, let's not forget that little detail where I can see the sleek curves of her endless arms and legs, taut and curvy in all the right places to be taut and curvy.

Corner of my eye, I see Gem finally stop looking at me. I'm surprised how I want her "gems" to stay over here, on me. I don't know if I want that feeling or not.

She flickers her gaze on Pip and her knight, Ann singing off to an invisible world which cheers her on most happily.

I look back at the huntress. She stares at me intently like some sort of predator ready to pounce on her prey. I stare back like a true opponent over prey. I am no-one's prey.

"What?"

She still stares. Blink. Shakes her head. "It is nothing. You remind me a lot of this girl, that's all." She drops her hand off my shoulder and it feels naked without it. "Wild but regal, eyes always ahead never down." She squeezes my hand "And powerful too. Not like her friend or anyone else's, but in her own way..." Her eyes cloud over distantly to a "once upon a time" of the two girls I already know she is thinking of.

"Sarah," I say the name without a second thought.

The huntress faces me, "What?"

I refused the urge to look away. "Sarah Rees Toome and Mary Dowd. They used to come here a lot..."

"But then Mary refused to take Sarah any more..." She finishes for me.

I widen my eyes. "What?"

"When one has power, the other depends on it and on her who can use it as a game of cat-and-mouse to the other sooner or later...," the huntress' eyes flash, "Mary did just that...She had the power to go in and out of the Realms, and held that power over Sarah. They always do sooner or later."

"Gemma would never do that," I say fiercely. I don't know who I am convincing. Me or the huntress...

Suddenly, I feel her hand drift over my collarbone. I stiffened. Was it heat I am feeling or a sickly sense of fear "There is a way to stop that from happening to you..."

"How?" I ask.

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After spending much time with the huntress, I come over to where the girls are holding a rabbit by its ears at my side, my other arm gripping onto the bloody arrow that had ended its life. 

They all looked grim, Pippa taunting and wide-eyed in only the way that could be so Pip "What if I choose the dream instead?"

I can't tell if she's teasing playfully or meanly at Gemma. Gemma is scowling back at her. Ann is looking at the two of them, uncomfortable.

"What if I refuse to bring you here the next time?" Gemma replies and my heart sinks, my stomach wrenching at remembering the huntress' words.

I don't let that show on my face as I interrupt them. "What is the matter?"

Pippa pouts prettily, a little girl denied a toy , "It's Gemma. She doesn't want to bring us back."

I tighten my grip on the arrow as I turn to Gem, "What's all this, Gemma?"

I focused in on her eyes. She stares back. She looks away then. "I didn't say that."

"Well, you implied it," Pippa says haughtily.

"Can we just forget this whole silly argument?" Gemma snaps, her eyes flash like they always do. Darken or lighten with emotion.

"Gemma." Pippa exaggeratively sticks her bottom lip out and goes doe-eyed. I bite back a laugh. "Don't be cross."

I match her expression toward Gemma's direction, my mouth droooping into that same bulldog face. "Gemma, please stop. It's very hard to talk with my mouth like this."

Ann joins in with Pip and I, and soon enough we manage to get Gemma and ourselves laughing on the ground

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It is only when we leave, that I look back at Gemma, the last one to go. The doorway still gapes open as she looks back at her mother holding hands with a little girl. There is an unreadable expression on her face.

Is she so ready to lose paradise, her mother? Again? Sometimes I hate that mysterious part to her, like you know her, then in the next second she is the perfect stranger, I know others feel that way with her the way I do. She's a puzzle that sometimes you try to finish happily, other times you feel frustrated over it and it'll bother you for days to come.

I feel the sickness coming in on me again, the fear, and I brush it off, turning away from Gemma who doesn't notice a thing.

I shut my eyes tight as I feel Gem close the door.

I turn around and I stare at her. She stares back. Her eyes still manage to look vibrant even in the dimness.

And I think back to Mary and Sarah. I won't be Sarah. I will be the cat eyes, the powerful...

I must.

Whether the puzzle is finished or not.

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**Whoo! This thing has been haunting me till I posted it. **

**I'd like to thank ThreeOranges again for checking this.**

**Anyone is welcome to give me a pairing and a word to go along with writing them out in a story. It can be slash or straight or whatever. I'm open to anything but incest. Just message me.**

**Afy signing off... **


	3. Silence

**On a request of LunaEquus, I went and did this chapter on Ann in.**

**Originally it was going to be Ann with her homely reflection starting somberly back through a mirror ( and I was going to throw in the Narcissus myth in it too) but that ended up becoming something bigger and I found the concept in this chapter a little too similar to the first one of this fic.**

**I decided to rebel a bit, and focus in on Ann's singing. I'd think that while being plain is a main link to her pain, Ann probably feels bad toward herself in other ways, if she's pretty, I'd say she can find something else to hate about herself and feel worthless of it. **

**Hopefully, y'all will like this and I cross my fingers you do.**

**Read. Review. Critique ALWAYS encouraged.**

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_ Chapter 3- Silence_

If I were to ever not sing ever again, if I were to ever be silent, I would kill myself. Silence makes me nothing, and nothingness cannot exist in life or death.

We have arrived from the Realms tonight, the same way as every other night; the magic coursing though our veins as if it were our own blood, even when Gemma was the one _truly_ born with the magic blood. Certainly not I, Pippa, or even Felicity.

We make it out in the hallway. Empty and dark, it is chillingly lifeless here. It's so cold it hurts to just breathe. It makes me realize in this pitch-dark hallway that I've read far too many Gothic novels than I should have read ---I suddenly think of a dark castles, demons, madness cutting holes through a man's mind, ruining it and his sense of morals, curses, dank decay... I swallow thickly. Maybe we should sneak into the Realms some other time of the day. The late afternoon perhaps?

Midnight_ is_ the time of wolf howls and animated skeletons after all. The curtain billows abruptly, with the moaning of harsh winds outside. I shudder and chide myself, less of the Gothics, and more of dear Lucy going past her perils, I tell myself sternly.

Pippa suddenly unleashes a fit of giddy giggling and Felicity angrily shushes for, but it's Gemma is the one who's able to really quiet her down---and with only a fierce glare. Sometimes I suspect Gemma knows the effect her sea-glass eyes can have on someone, she certainly knows how to use it well, I'll say that.

Pippa looks down, guiltily compliant, and I don't even think before I rest my hand on her arm. She stiffens in surprise, but smiles at me as she realizes who it is. My breath hitches.

Only Pippa and Gemma can do that - cause so much reaction whilst hardly doing anything for it. Gemma with her eyes, and Pippa with her eyes as well as everything else, her lips, her hair, just everything...It can hurt just looking at how pretty she is.

The four of us sneak our way into the room which Gemma and I share. Felicity opens the door with us following behind her, pauses, then closes it. I frown in puzzlement, and I imagine Gemma and Pippa mirror the same expression on their own faces.

Felicity smirks over her shoulder at us, tightens her grip on the knob, and opens the door again. We find ourselves in awe in what Felicity has done to our poor plain room.

She's made it into the room of a palace!

It's far bigger than before, high-ceilinged, and holding such sleek and clean-cut elegance. The floor is shining black marble, the walls bone-white and smoothly polished, made of a precious material I can't identify. At one corner of the room there is a large vanity which we immediately head to. There's a bench which can seat all four of us easily and so we line up in front of the mirror — right to left, Felicity, Gemma, Pippa and I.

Happily, the other three undo their corset laces and hooks, tilting their heads back with wide, toothy grins as they shut their eyes, deeply exhaling in relief as well as looking practically aroused in doings so. I remain where I am. I don't need to see the mirror to already know what I look like-- my face has already haunted me enough, thank you.

Suddenly, I feel someone tug my arm. It's Pippa. I let her grab my hand and follow after her when she tugs at me to hurry up.

I open my mouth to ask where we're going and why, but my mouth promptly closes when, at the corner of my eye, I see Felicity press her mouth where Gemma's long neck meets her very freckled shoulder. Oh...

Pippa (surprisingly) quietly leads me to the Great Hall and we hide ourselves in Felicity's tent. "I think we ought to leave them alone." She says to me. "Methinks Fee wants to lecture more on the Sapphists with Gemmy." She giggles again, and hastily I shush her.

Is she drunk?!

Just to be sure, I lean over to smell her breath. She stares at me looks over to and I swallow thickly, sitting back nervously as she sends me a raised brow as well as a coy smirk. "Me thinks YOU want to know more about the Sapphists," She says, in barely more than a whisper. Pippa pauses for a moment, studying me, and then she starts snickering, sputtering like a horse.

I gesture for her to lower her voice, and she grins, biting down on her bottom lip. I realize something then. Pippa _is_ drunk. Drunk on magic. Is that even possible ?

Before I say anything, her hands suddenly reach for the sides of my body, beneath my breasts, and my breath stills. I imagine her unhooking and unlacing what I am wearing right now, and I'm not sure if I'm either repulsed or hoping for it. I shut my eyes tightly, banishing thoughts of us rolling together across the floor before one us pins the other down.

"Annie, Annie," Pippa croons. I look up in surprise. What did she just call me?

Her tongue slips between her pouting lips, running it around her whole mouth. Pippa's long, white hands trail up from HER sides to frame my face, and she says quietly, her eyes darkening to aubergine as brown-black hair fell over them: "Well, we certainly can't leave you ignorant of the Sapphists then, shall we...?" And then she kisses me full on the lips.

It was intense. It was almost burning hot. I wanted to pull away. I wanted to lean into it.

It was an eternity but it was also far too short a kiss when Pippa finally fell back on the support of her palms to the floor with a ripe grin across her face.

"Pippa," I say breathlessly, "We need to go back to the room."

She lets loose a small giggle after I say that.

"What ?"

"It's just... those are the first words you've said all night since we came back." She says, as she leans forward, and her soft hand curves along the side of my face. I lean into it with a delirious smile I can't control. Maybe silence won't be the end of my life after all. Maybe I can go on with it.

I wonder if Pippa will tell me more on the Sapphists. It really is an interesting subject to me after all.

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** Seriously, raise your hands if you think Pip and Ann would make hot-ass lesbians. Anyone?**


	4. Halcyon Days

**Author's Note: I apologize profusely for the long wait. I just recently recovered from a nasty writer's block.**

**Behold! At last, my first Karma. I've left some footnotes at the bottom for the story above. I'm just awesome that way. 'Grins wickedly'  
**

**Request by _Freexflyer_, so here you go dahling!**

**Also much love for _ThreeOranges_, a guardian angel of all beta-readers! Readherfics! They're good...**

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**_ Halcyon days-definition- a period of peace and happiness- an idyllic time_**

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**Chapter Four- Halcyon Days**

_"Kartik," she whispered with a slight smile..._

_A black cloche hat (1) fits securely over her pinned hair, curled chunks of it spilling out into red tendrils gleaming hidden gold. Shining perfectly from her hat was a silver ornament, and a strange one at that - an eye upon a crescent moon staring at him. Luminous like her eyes..._

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_"Kartik," she panted, and fell back against her pillow, damp and bedraggled, warm golden red hair spread out like wings ready to take flight. She was sheen with sweat, her neck dazzling white with the beginnings of freckles where her neck flowed down into shoulders; he looks down at the hollow of her throat : On it was a silver eye upon a crescent moon staring up at him._

_Kartik fixes his eyes on hers..._

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_"Kartik!" she yells happily from across the lush green field, hair loose and shimmering like a halo, edging gold around the redness. She wears the eye upon the crescent; it gazes at him nearly mockingly and all at once invitingly._

_Her eyes..._

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It is raining heavily, forcefully, like a cascade of wet pebbles whose might nearly bruises and numbs him to the very marrow of his bones. His whole vision is blurring together into wet grays. 

Kartik still sits in the swing, fingers bent around the heavy chains and the hood of his gray sweatshirt pulled over his curly head. His clothing, a gray hooded pullover and black baggy jeans makes him almost disappear into the storm.

"Kartik," someone says.

Kartik looks up.

In front of him is a teenage boy, seventeen or so, a year younger than him if a day. He is tall-taller than him (2)- and wisp-thin, only broad at the shoulders. The hood of his bright green sweatshirt hides his hair from view, his faint fair eyebrows illuminating that he is most definitely not a  
brunet. His eyes stare into Kartik's own ink-dark ones. They are luminescent and pierce through the graceless dreariness of the storm,they are so bright….

And green.

The young man stares at Kartik, paying no heed to the rain. "It's weird to see you out of the Spence school uniform," he says offhandedly, tilting his head to the side. How green his eyes...

"Jeremy-"

"Jem."

"Jem," Kartik sighs. "The reason why I asked you out here is because--" he takes a deep breath "-I want to tell you to stop following me."

Jem stares. Expressionless. Kartik pauses. Where the hell did he inherit those eyes? From a ghost?

"I've told your friends to tell you, I've told your sister-"

"You told Tori(3)?"

"I told your parents," Kartik carries on without missing a beat, "I had my brother try to tell you and now I'm telling you face- first to stop, to quit it with the bloody stalking." He is surprised to find his voice rising.

"I'm not stalking you," Jem says, "I'm just persistently following you everywhere you go."

"Are you serious?!" Kartik demands and stands up, looking up(4) at him, "Are you really that stupid or are you just taking the piss out of me(5)!?"

"Don't ever speak to me that way again," say Jem dully as if reciting a poem in front of class. Kartik stiffens, ink eyes wide as saucer cups. "I am no longer content to be the scared, obedient schoolgirl. Who are you, a stranger, to tell me what I can and cannot do?"

"I am Rakshana," Kartik delivers in a breathless whisper. He knows those words, those are the words of one of his many dreams, his dreams of her….

"Ah, yes-the great and mysterious Rakshana. The powerful brotherhood who feel threatened by things they cannot understand and have to hide themselves behind a boy." Jem cups Kartik's cheek in his palm, how feminine his hands are, Kartik thinks. "You're not a man. You're their lackey. I don't care about you, or your brother, or your ridiculous organization."

The rain is the only sound between them. Silent tears.

"It was in that lifetime, Kartik," Jem tells him quietly, "in that very night that you fell in love with me after I said those very words to you."

Kartik sucks in his breath.

"And I fell in love with you even before that."

"My dreams…"

"Are real. Every dream you've ever had is real, every dream a lifetime taking place, a lifetime of you and me together, following after one another forevermore." He pulls out an amulet on a chain around his neck. The eye upon the crescent moon stares at him. It had always stared at him, it always will...

Kartik shakily exhales all the tension in him. Now it is only an anticipating warmth of some kind.

"We follow one another always into what place fate will take us."

Kartik thickly swallows, "You don't believe in fate."

"No, I can't say I ever believed in it," the hood slips off Jem's head, reveals red curls hanging down over his forehead and temples, grazing at the neckline, damp with wet. "I still don't -" he pauses "but you did."

"And I still do. I believe…" Kartik trails off, and closes his eyes. He nods and then opens them to stare at Jeremy-Jem-Gemma!-him!-no!-her!-whatever!

A smile spreads over Jem's face, his constellation of freckles standing out. Kartik likes the effect of it.

"Took you long enough." Jem murmurs as he leans his mouth against his, then lightly kisses him.

Kartik deepens it, deepens the kiss of a thousand years together, the Halcyon days made whole, and made to last forevermore.

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**Read. Review and please, please, please critique! Also if you want me to do a request on a certain pairing I promise to do that. It's fun getting suggestions!**

**1.Cloche hat- Kartik's first dream of Gemma and himself takes place in the 1920's. The cloche hat was was one of many of the roaring twenties' rocking fashion fads. I took the idea from LunaEquus when I read her story "Sweet Misery" a modern New Yorker take on AGATB. She says that she sees Gemma as a fan of the roaring twenties and well I just liked that idea too.**

**2.Taller than him- Gemma is a tall girl and I'd imagine her only an inch or two short of Kartik's height in the novel. I like to think she's even taller than him if they were in the 20's because, dammit, taller girl-shorter guy couples are hot and there need to be more of them!**

**3."You told Tori?"-Yes. 'snickers' I gave Gemma's brother Tom a sex-change too.**

**4."looking up at him"-'snickers'**

**5."taking the piss"-British slang. Takes place in London this chapter and it means to tease and ridicule.**


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